It must have been around 1986, when I was around 15 years or so, that I learned Basic on my Commodore C64. I had gotten it as a birthday present from my parents and it was amazing.
Initially it had no storage drive since the VC1541 was kind of expensive. So I learned to write programs on it with the help of the manual. Only a few games to distract me. Just writing these programs and learning to organize my code was something I could do for hours and hours.
Needless to say that unbeknownst to me I am like many other programmers, autistic. But this was something that took me around 30 more years to figure out and get diagnosed.
When I started with Basic I learned to organize my code into blocks, defined by their line numbers range. Very often I reorganized the line numbers to be exactly and neatly 10 apart, blocks being exactly 1000 apart. Fiddling in a new line between e.g. 70 and 80 meant to either add a new line 71 to the code or reorganizing the subsequent line numbers. And since it felt unorganized and messy to have a line number like 71 between the well organized 70 and 80 I rather spent my time reorganizing the subsequent line numbers than having messy code⦠as I said, autistic.
Line numbers were not just line numbers, they were what held the code together. They were an integral part of the code and code was unthinkable without line numbers. My sister who is 3 years older than me told my that at the bank where she was in her professional training the people were programming without line numbers! Unthinkable and impossible! Code floating around in the nether without being attached to whatever the line numbers anchored the code to, that wouldnât work. She was just stupid⦠:-)
When I finished my program, usually an address management program to store peoples adresses in memory, I had no means of saving the program. So I left the computer running for a couple of days and enjoyed my program. And then turned it of knowing that I could rewrite it as often as I wanted to. And I rewrote it a couple of timesâ¦
Later my older brother built (like in soldering) a datasette from scratch so that I could store my code on audio tapes. What an improvement! I still can recall the sound it made when storing the program.
Nice trip down the memory lane! Basic tought me everything I needed to become the freelancer I am today. I still learn new languages in the way I learned my first.